State of the Map 2026: OpenStreetMap conference

The author attended the State of the Map 2026 conference's scientific track after a 15-year absence, observing that OpenStreetMap remains a vital resource for researchers with over 1,250 academic papers citing it in 2025. The conference demonstrated OSM's growing maturity, with increased commercial involvement and professional adoption alongside its core community of long-term contributors, while the scientific presentations highlighted OSM's value as an accessible, open dataset for experimentation despite requiring data quality management.